this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Fedora even switched to Wayland by default in 2016 (at least for the GNOME release). I don't know what they were thinking. 8 to 9 years before they were already using Wayland... and it still have some "problems". Can't imagine what you were going through. :D
But compared to Fedora, Ubuntu only did change temporarily to Wayland right? I mean it was not an LTS version. I installed LTS 18.04 and don't remember anything like that by default.
Fedora 42 even eliminated X11 as an option (I think they're reversing that stance now, though), which made it unusable on my (now dead) Nvidia laptop with dual monitors. I thought they really jumped the gun on that one.
I ended up jumping to AMD graphics so I wouldn't have any problems with Wayland, but then discovered there's a nasty bug that causes frequent system freezes on AMD systems. Thankfully I was on Debian, so I could easily switch back to X11. Things have been stable now, but I just feel like I can't win with Wayland π
Wayland does seem to work well with Intel graphics, at least.
This is one of the big problems Wayland and its proponents tended to have and still have in general:
They insist on selling vaporware. Or on doing the Ubuntu thing where they just push dev onto production for the users to become unpaid tester workforce. And then they have the gall to complain that people notice things don't work.
Curiously enough, I don't recall pulseaudio (another member of this "nu-linux" / Microsoft(TM) Linux trend) was like this. Sure, Fedora packaged it horribly, but I don't recall it having been pushed as a default to prod when it was unusable.
Or I am lucky to not have noticed. Oh well.
I do think there's a balance to be struck where at some point, a larger swath of people need to use that software even if it's not 100% ready, as then it creates more 'pressure' to actually address those final roadblocks. Wayland did seem to improve at a faster rate since it was introduced by default on some distros.
And at least in the Linux world, we have many options to avoid being on that bleeding edge. I'm pretty happy just sticking with Debian as opposed to getting the new stuff, and while I was annoyed I couldn't use my preferred DE on Fedora, I've learned that Debian is actually pretty slick in its own way, which removed the slight sense of FOMO I once had.